Technical Field
The present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for online search. Particularly, the present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for presenting search results to users.
Discussion of Technical Background
Online content search is a process of interactively searching for and retrieving requested information via a search application running on a local user device, such as a computer or a mobile device, from online databases. Online search is conducted through search engines, which are programs running at a remote server and searching webpages or documents for specified keywords and return a search results page having a list of links to the webpages or documents where the keywords are found.
The known search result pages provide a list of links to websites or documents—each with a one-sentence snippet from the webpages, which are incomplete and sometimes redundant. FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary prior art search results page 100 with snippets 102, 104, 106 presented with each link to a website or document (search results) in response to the search query “Google breakup.” In this prior art example, each snippet is merely a predefined certain segment (usually the first sentence or part of the first sentence) of the corresponding webpage or document. Snippets, however, most often cannot well serve the purpose of providing sufficient context or insight of the webpage or document so as to help users to quickly determine the relevance of each search result without further clicking on the search result.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved solution for presenting search results to users to solve the above-mentioned problems.